ArticleOne of the saddest laments I often hear when tragedy strikes is “why me?” It’s a thoroughly natural question as we grapple with suffering, sorrow and pain, and in the Bible God’s people certainly often cry out to him in their distress.
But it is an unanswerable question. It is more a cry of existential pain and bewilderment than it is a rational query seeking a concrete answer.
One might ask the obverse question “why not me?”, for God’s purpose is far more than merely to make my life comfortable. But a much more important form of the question – far less often asked and equally unanswerable – is “why me?” when it comes to blessing and happiness.
Why have I been granted a life of joy, comfort, a satisfying career, a family, plentiful access to the things I love? What did I do to deserve that?
I might equally have been born in the Sudan to die of starvation or civil war before I reach a few weeks of age.
It was this utterly essential gratitude that drew me to faith as an adult convert, and provided my wife and me with the perspective to cope with pain and loss in our own lives (we have buried two children).
Suffering comes within a context in which I am certain of God’s promise that everything will work for good to those who love him (so the Apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Rome), however little I see it now.
This attitude is personified in the Old Testament book of Job, where the title character loses everything: his wealth, his family, his health, and sits on the ground covered in painful boils.
But in his affliction, Job “does not charge God foolishly”. Instead, he astutely observes that “man is born into trouble, as the sparks fly upwards”. He also accepts that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away.
When I was a new Christian, a friend and I used to try to imagine being persecuted for our faith, as happens in much of the world. Of course it was a fruitless exercise – only suffering really prepares one for suffering.
But the starting point of gratitude does serve as a form of preparation for the suffering everyone will endure, for to be born is to know suffering.
Gratitude provides a context of freedom and peace in which suffering can gain meaning in the wider narrative of which it is part – or even just be endured. Suffering is not the last word.
I look to the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, which tells me to be content with what I have, for God says “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.”
Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of The Centre for Public Christianity. This article was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald.